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Just came back from my two-week trip to China. It's the first time seeing my family and friends in more than four years. Stayed in a small city near Shanghai and travel around in the region. Here are some observations: Overall economy is very challenging, although some high end restaurants seem to be doing fine. real estate will be doomed for years to come according to a real estate company executive friend. Even rural areas have a lot of high rise apartments (around 30 stories). I suspect these will be very costly to maintain and most Chinese are known for their frugalness. Don't feel good about the value of these building in 20 years. and most people i know already have multiple apartments. world class infrastructure everywhere, ie high speed rail, subway, etc. some of those projects were built to increase land value. While they look great, I'm not sure about the economic soundness. They are also very costly to maintain. e-commerce is very active, many people do grocery online nowadays. It's hard to increase consumption. most wealth is concentrated in people born in 60s, 70s. They grew up frugal and most people don't feel the desire to consume. The biggest spending is on food, but you can only eat 3 meals a day. secondly, the income decease is very real. a few years ago, local government employees were making over RMB300k, now it's about half, sometime lower. most people are stressed except the retirees. rich people (some centimillionaires) are worried about their shrinking net worth. and poor people are working 10-hour days to make their mortgage payment. although national birth rate are low. people i know are still having kids. but it could be they are local in a small city that is more affordable. most of the wealthy people's kids are living/studying in US or Europe. some of my friends, who used to drive BMW, Audi, are now driving Chinese made EVs.

Is it strange? I mean the man lied about the health of Tesla publicly when battling David Einhorn, misrepresented the reasons for the Solar City acquisition which was clearly just to bail out his cousins, lied publicly about taking Tesla private @ $420, etc etc etc Governance and integrity have largely been lacking at Tesla for years and years and investors didn't care because they continued to get fabulously wealthy. As long as 'line go up', nobody cares about his self dealing, misrepresentations of fact, or the lack arms length/independent negotiations between his various entities when dealing with one another. It only becomes a problem that they'll care about when the stock goes down in a sustained basis.